Posted on his blog today, Mark Delany, Chief Architect and inventor of DomainKeys, explains what is to be expected next: "Everything hinges on wide-spread adoption. Now that DKIM is on Standards Track, the hurdle to global adoption has been greatly reduced, but not cleared. ...the email industry is so big and diverse that evangelizing, education and encouragement are needed to ensure the success of DKIM."

DKIM is an email authentication framework aimed at addressing email forgery by using cryptography to verify the domain of the sender. DKIM allows email providers to validate the originating domain of an email by making use of blacklists and whitelists and intends to make phishing attacks easier to detect by helping to identify abusive domains.

A diverse number of organization have been reported to have played a role on moving the DKIM proposal forward including: Cisco, IBM, Earthlink, Microsoft, Spamhaus, Google, PayPal as well as FTC and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).